Abstract
The study tested the impact of the phonological and lexical distance between a dialect of Palestinian Arabic spoken in the north of Israel (SpA) and Modern Standard Arabic (StA or MSA) on word and non-word repetition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and in typically developing (TD) age-matched controls. Fifty kindergarten children (25 SLI, 25 TD; mean age 5;5) and fifty first grade children (25 SLI, 25 TD; mean age 6:11) were tested with a repetition task for 1–4 syllable long real words and pseudo words; Items varied systematically in whether each encoded a novel StA phoneme or not, namely a phoneme that is only used in StA but not in the spoken dialect targeted. Real words also varied in whether they were lexically novel, meaning whether the word is used only in StA, but not in SpA. SLI children were found to significantly underperform TD children on all repetition tasks indicating a general phonological memory deficit. More interesting for the current investigation is the observed strong and consistent effect of phonological novelty on word and non-word repetition in SLI and TD children, with a stronger effect observed in SLI. In contrast with phonological novelty, the effect of lexical novelty on word repetition was limited and it did not interact with group. The results are argued to reflect the role of linguistic distance in phonological memory for novel linguistic units in Arabic SLI and, hence, to support a specific Linguistic Distance Hypothesis of SLI in a diglossic setting. The implications of the findings for assessment, diagnosis and intervention with Arabic speaking children with SLI are discussed.
Highlights
Specific language impairment affects ≈3.5–7% of the children (Tomblin et al, 1996) and is defined as “persistent difficulties in the acquisition and use of language. . . [when] the difficulties are not attributable to hearing or other sensory impairment, motor dysfunction, or another medical or neurological condition, and are not better explained by intellectual disability or global developmental delay” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 42)
typically developing (TD) children were sampled from public schools in the north school district in Israel and specific language impairment (SLI) children were sampled from the same area; SLI children were recruited from Language Centers, which are kindergarten and day care centers serving children diagnosed by a speech and language pathologist as having developmental language disorders; First Grade SLI children were former enrolls to Language Centers who attend public schools in the same area
TD children were the second lowest (b); first grade SLI children aligned with their kindergarten counterparts (b), whereas first grade TD children received the highest scores among all groups (c)
Summary
Specific language impairment (hereafter, SLI; referred to as Language Disorder, LD) affects ≈3.5–7% of the children (Tomblin et al, 1996) and is defined as “persistent difficulties in the acquisition and use of language. . . [when] the difficulties are not attributable to hearing or other sensory impairment, motor dysfunction, or another medical or neurological condition, and are not better explained by intellectual disability or global developmental delay” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 42). SLI results from a deficit in input processing capacity, such as phonological short-term memory (Gathercole and Baddeley, 1990) or auditory or phonological processing (Tallal et al, 1991, 1993; Joanisse and Seidenberg, 1998). The specific phonological skills implicated in word repetition, and the extent to which it might be influenced by linguistic structural factors (such as phonotactic probabilities, morphological structure, etc.) vis-a-vis functional sociolinguistic factors (such as spheres of use, experience, practice, etc.) Both sets of factors are expected to impact phonological processing in memory and might, be associated with intrapersonal and inter-personal differences in repetition capacities
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